In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [22]
For the CAUSE alone is worthy till the good days bring the best.
Come, join in the only battle wherein no man can fail,
Where whoso fadeth and dieth, yet his deed shall still prevail.
Ah! come, cast off all fooling, for this, at least, we know:
That the Dawn and the Day is coming, and forth the Banners go.
—The Day Is Coming
Science, too, has generated new myth systems. (By “myth” I mean a story central to our self-understanding: nothing about truth or falsehood is implied.) Here, for instance, is a new creation myth: the universe began with a Big Bang. Then the Earth was formed of cosmic dust. What came before the Big Bang? A singularity. What is a singularity? We don’t know.
Here is a new origin-of-people myth: people emerged via something called evolutionary forces from pre-human life forms that also so emerged. What created the rules for evolution? Life did. Where did life come from? We’re not sure, but we’re working on it. Why are we on Earth? No particular reason. Any idea why we should behave well? Most likely because food-gathering goes better in small groups, such as were common in the Pleistocene, if the males aren’t murdering each other all the time and copulating with the other males’ mates. What about relationships between men and women? We’re studying that now, through brain measurements and pheromones and anthropological evidence and, oh, all sorts of things, and we hope to have a mathematical formula for falling in love any time soon. How about a belief in God, or gods? Well, granted, most cultures have had such a thing. Maybe such a belief is an evolved adaptation. Maybe your survival chances are better if you think there is a powerful being on your side who has a master plan. But there probably isn’t much more to it than that.
As a story, the scientific mythos is not very comforting. Probably that’s why it hasn’t become wildly popular: we human beings prefer stories that have a central role in them for us, that preserve some of our mystery and thus some of our dignity, and that imply there might be help at hand if we really need some. The scientific version of our existence on this planet may very well be physically true, but we don’t like it much. It isn’t cuddly. There aren’t many tunes you can hum in the shower.
Thus: myths are stories that are central to their cultures and that are taken seriously enough that people organize their ritual and emotional lives around them, and can even start wars over them. Such stories go underground, as it were, when the core statements about truth and reality repeated in the stories cease to be entirely, factually believed. But they then emerge in other guises, such as Art, or political ideologies.
Or films like Avatar. Or books like The Left Hand of Darkness. For every question that myths address, SF has addressed also. Indeed, it’s arguable that this form and its subforms have subsumed the mythic areas abandoned by literature after the meta-theological poetics of Paradise Lost and the meta-theological fabulations of The Pilgrim’s Progress and the extended theology-based other-world-building of William Blake’s long “prophecies.”
Before going into specifics, I’ll say a little about the history of the term science fiction. This label brings together two terms you’d think would be mutually exclusive, since science—from scientia, meaning knowledge—is supposed to concern itself with demonstrable facts, and fiction—which derives from the Latin root verb fingere, meaning to mould, devise, or feign—denotes a thing that is invented. With science fiction, one term is often thought to cancel out the other. Thus such books may be judged as factual predictions, with the fiction part—the story, the characters, the invention component—rendering them useless for anyone who really wants to get a grip on, say, space travel or nanotechnology. On the other hand, they may be treated the way W. C. Fields treated golf when he spoke of it as a good walk spoiled—that is, the books are seen as fictional narratives